Term paper

Tentative topics

• Language
  • Language evolution
    • Hurford, J. (2003) The Language Mosaic and its Evolution. In M.H. Christiansen and S. Kirby (Eds.) Language Evolution: The States of the Art, Oxford University Press.
    • Kirby, S. (2002) Natural Language from Artificial Life. Artificial Life, 8(2):185--215.
  • Forms of animal communication (broadly thinking)
• Learning
  • Role of reinforcement in animal studies
  • Evolutionary advantage(s) of different memory systems
  • Imitation vs. instruction
• General intelligence
  • Tool use
  • Abstract thinking in animals (contrasting to human infants would be interesting)
• Connection to CS and AI
  • Building a super being: how to use our knowledge on human and animal cognitive capacities to build intelligent systems, and for what purposes (cognition including thinking and reasoning, learning, language, perception, consciousness, ...)
  • Top-down or bottom-up? (should we study the behavior or the neurons in order to understand and implement intelligence)
• Simple simulation study. The following articles may give you some ideas:
  • Memory length and foraging strategy in Lizard
  • Simulations combining evolution and learning
• Dog, cat, horse, spider, you name it, cognition; if you are intrested in a specific non-human animal species, you can review the studies that have been done on that species' cognitive abilities.
• Sex differences as a function of cognitive evolution
  • Sherry, David F. (2004). Asking 'how?' versus asking 'why?' Review of Why Men won't Ask for Directions by R.C. Francis. Cerebrum 6, 89 -98.
• Emotions
  • Fellous, Jean-Marc, Jorge L. Armony, and Joseph E. LeDoux (2002), Emotional Circuits and Computational Neuroscience, In M.A. Arbib (Ed.) The handbook of brain theory and neural networks, Second edition, The MIT Press.
• Biological evolution and cultural change
  • Laland, Kevin N., John Odlin-Smee, and Marcus W. Fieldman (2000), Niche Construction, Biological Evolution and Cultural Change. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 23 (1), 131-175.
• Discontinuities (intra-species and inter-species)

Bibliographies

1. Philosophy of Cognitive Ethology: Annotated Bibliography
2. Social cognition
3. Cognitive ethology
4. Cognitive cultural studeis
5. Animal studies
6. Studies of animal cognition